Matthouse

FCC tackles net neutrality

I just realized I haven’t posted in …  Well, a long time…  I didn’t go out of my way to come up with something to post about, this just seems like something I should chime in on…

One of the things Obama talked about while campaigning was reforms in the area of telecommunications.  I usually don’t believe a single thing a politition says, but that goes double for when they’re on the campaign trail.  Right, left, Red, Green, Blue, Purple, doesn’t matter…  Most of them will say whatever they think will get them (re)elected.  You have to judge a person by their actions.

Obama’s new FCC chair recently proposed new rules regarding the neutrality of network service providers of all types, not just common-carriers.   In the past, they’ve had a “policy” on this, pretty much saying “net neutrality is good”.  The new rules pretty much say that service providers of all types can not discriminate when it comes to certain types of traffic (for example, a cable company would not be allowed to block or de-prioritize Vonage packets because they compete with the company’s own VoIP product).  I strongly feel this is a good thing.  Strangely, the industry seems to be fairly supportive of this action — but this might just be a case of ‘if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’.

The rules seemingly apply to wireless, too, which has the cellular industry up in arms.  Previously, the cellular companies have had strict rules against utilizing any product, application, or service intended to make phone calls without using per-minute airtime (meaning, no VoIP, no Skype, no Google Voice…)  Of course there’s not a lot they can do if use my EV-DO card on my laptop, make a VPN connection to the office, and then fire up my soft phone — but per their policy, this would not be allowed.  In any case, this means they won’t let you run VoIP applications directly on the handset.  (Some carriers, such as Verizon, take this a step (or two) further — every handset made today has a GPS chip, which sends your location when you call 911.  Smartphones of course can make use of the GPS for other things — Verizon sells a service called VZNavigator, for $9 a month, which puts GPS-based street-level navigation with turn-by-turn directions  in the palm of your hand.  The problem?  Google Maps is available for free, and would happily utilize the GPS chip, except that Verizon locks them out of it…  But I digress…)

My first impression is, if you’re pissing everybody off (and not just one side or the other), you must be doing something right…  It feels like this might just be another way to bring down the big mean corporations, how dare they make a profit!  But this is something I can get behind, in order to make the internet as a whole more fair for everybody.  In the interest of a free and open internet (generally speaking), no provider should be allowed to block or hinder access to other providers content, even if that content competes with a product offered by the provider in question.

One exception I can think of is that a company like Comcast should be able to prioritize their own VoIP traffic above all other internet traffic (in a way that doesn’t discriminate at all).  But even that could be considered anti-competitive — they’d be making their product better at the expense of everybody else’s product in an otherwise neutral environment.

Somebody I talked to once suggested that carriers should not be allowed to provide content.  In other words, the owner of the pipe isn’t allowed to own the bits going through it.  There’s something to that, but I’m not ready to go there yet.

Thoughts?